Moments after lifting its nose into the night sky, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 doused the powerful forward-facing lights used for takeoff and disappeared into the clouds. In that first hour of the new day, exactly one year ago, the Beijing-bound jetliner joined a staggering constellation of radar blips and computerized call signs that would grow to more than 26,000 commercial airline flights worldwide on a typical day.

That vast celestial manifest was borne aloft on the strength of a single idea: That flying, once considered impossible, is now safer than any other form of travel, including walking.

So when Malaysia Air’s twice-daily milk run from Kuala Lumpur vanished, suddenly, from radar, and then, completely, from the face of the Earth, there was near unanimous belief that it would be found.

We live under an unblinking, omniscient electronic eye, with more control than ever over the location of things in our lives. At any given moment, global positioning satellites are triangulating the location of our wandering phones and wayward spouses. It is therefore not supposed to be possible for a Boeing 777 — weighing 650,000 pounds and stretching 212 feet from one wing tip to the other — to vanish, literally, into thin air.

But it did. When that happens, how do we explain the unexplainable?

There is precious little mystery left in our lives. We are influenced by technology in the way that aboriginal tribes were ruled by wind and fire. In the belief system here on Google Earth, there are no secrets from our spy satellites. The Loch Ness Monster? Bermuda Triangle? Nope. Science has banished those fabulist figments from our collective imagination. So how are we to take in the unfathomable mystery of that missing plane?

“Some people tend to believe in the infallibility of technology, at least until it fails,” says Peter G. Neumann, principal scientist in the computer lab at SRI International in Menlo Park. “But humans build computer systems, so it should not be surprising that technology is not infallible.”

Not only not infallible, but when all too fallible humans read the data wrong, the effect can be like a magician’s use of misdirection on the outcome of an illusion. After MH370 flew toward Vietnamese airspace and disappeared, it continued to send out pings that were detected by a satellite, which set searchers scouring 25,000 square miles at the bottom of the sea. And one year later, they have found not a single shred of wreckage, nor any of the 239 souls on board.

Wherever they go, human beings leave behind contrails of data, forensic footprints in the sand, and when they aren’t there it forces us to tease out explanations of our own. It also creates dramatic tension. Magicians understand this better than anybody, which is why they never make something vanish without later making it reappear. “When you vanish something, you create tension,” says Greg Wilson, a popular stage magician from Los Angeles. “One of the most important things for an audience is the release of that tension. You vanish a bunny rabbit, you’ve got to bring it back. Or everybody wants to know, ‘Where’s the bunny?’ ”

Until it blinked off, the transponder aboard Malaysia Airlines 370 emitted the identifying prefix MH — in contrast to commercial aviation’s characteristically cold radar designators, it stands for “Malaysian Hospitality.” The prefix is a sorting system created by the International Air Transport Association, which was formed in 1945 in Havana, Cuba — later a popular destination for airline hijackers. After 40 minutes aloft, MH370 suddenly disappeared from air traffic control screens.

Moments later, its transponder apparently turned off, the plane turned sharply to the west, where it was picked up on military radar. Several more hours passed before Malaysian authorities even acknowledged the plane was missing, inexplicably launching a multinational search effort in the South China Sea. A week later, authorities admitted they had known all along the plane couldn’t be there. After a series of satellite pings indicated the jetliner could have flown for as long as five hours past its last radar sighting, aviation experts said the desperate hunt for the plane and its precious human cargo was far more difficult than looking for a needle in a haystack.

“We haven’t even found the farm,” Bill Schofield of the Royal Aeronautical Society told the Australian Financial Review, “let alone the haystack.”

At 35,000 feet, we do not think of ourselves as one of a thousand radar blips, floating slowly as if in some computer screen saver. We are the center of the known universe, parsing every tremor of turbulence for hidden meaning. “Aviation occupies a very special position in the panoply of things to be nervous about in modern life,” says John N. Nance, a former airline pilot and aviation expert for ABC News. “You walk into this little tube, where you’re legally as well as physically under the control of somebody else. We’re not really sure we were really meant to fly anyway. Given that, if you disappear an airliner, it puts a massive and permanent chill in anyone who climbs on one. Because now it can happen to any of us.”

So great is our fascination with the fate of humans in flight that three-quarters of a century after Amelia Earhart’s twin-engine Electra disappeared over the Pacific in 1937, she remains a figure of enduring mystery. And Earhart wasn’t flying one of the most technologically sophisticated aircraft ever designed like the Boeing 777, a flying communications center bristling with redundant safety systems.

As months passed without a single shard of debris from the plane’s presumed wreckage washing ashore anywhere, self-described “obsessives” hatched elaborate conspiracy theories that had the aircraft flying — and landing — as far north as Kazakhstan. If the plane wasn’t anywhere, it was effectively everywhere. And that meant it was capable of servicing any plot device: pilot suicide, terrorist hijacking or entering a wormhole where the series “Lost” is in endless reruns.

The plane’s zigzag path around radar installations after it ended communications and turned west left no doubt among aviation experts that whatever happened was intentional. Nance, who has written 13 thrillers set in the not-so-friendly skies, has trouble imagining a plot as unbelievable as the true story of MH370. He suspects the plane was snatched by al-Qaida as a precursor to the next 9/11.

“If you want to terrorize the world, and show people how powerful you are, what better way to do it than have 10 or 15 airplanes disappear at the same time, in the same way, with no trace whatsoever?” Nance says. “Was this a pathfinder mission to see if they could make an airplane full of people just utterly disappear?”

It could be years before there’s an answer to that. Until then, everybody wants to know, where’s the bunny?

Contact Bruce Newman at 408-920-5004. Follow him at Twitter.com/brucenewmantwit.